Interns reporting these problems must receive immediate and full attention from mentors and org admins.

Teams staying in touch on a daily basis via IRC have more chances to succeed.

It really makes a difference, even if they only share a regular time frame idling in the same channel.

Recurrent and properly scheduled weekly meetings are useful to make sure that the team stays focused and aligned, as long as they don't substitute the regular communication in public channels.

Interns using bug reporting and code review regularly have more chances of success.

These tools require more discipline, and open the project beyond the mentors to the rest of the community.

Weekly reports must be required and plugged to Wikimedia's pyramid of reports (example)

Difficulties coming up with a decent report or delays delivering it are a good symptom of deeper problems.

Learning to explain your work is sometimes as important as the work itself.

There is no forgiveness at the mid-term evaluation, and interns must know this.

A pattern to avoid: intern under-performs in the first half, but promises to over-perform in the second, or later.

The first half is indeed more complicated, but the right approach is to plan the proposal accordingly.

Keep the community informed regarding your project updates.

It is recommended to send an email to wikitech-l at the beginning of your project and right after mid-term evaluations. Keep it simple: A project summary/short description and a link to where the weekly reporting can be found.

Interns must send a summary of their project to wikitech-l at the end of the program.

A blog post is good, but as a complement or "web version" of the mail sent to our main community channel.